Kin Reward Engine — Q1 Key Achievements and Q2 Objectives

As the first quarter of 2019 has ended and a new exciting quarter is now underway, we wanted to share with our community a quick recap of the previous quarter and the squad objectives for Q2.

For those interested in an overview of what the Kin Reward Engine (KRE) is and some details of how a payout looks like, check out the following posts: KRE introduction, the 1st KRE payout, and the latest March KRE payout details.

Q1 Key Achievements and Learnings

Q1 2019 was all about launching the essentials necessary for the KRE. Three of our key achievements were:

1. Initiating a direct conversation with the community and sharing the KRE principles (transparency, efficiency, and fair and equal opportunity) with the world, while making sure apps benefiting from the KRE are aligned with them and find them acceptable through conducting interviews and surveys.
2. Launching the KRE payout process to reward app developers. We started small rewarding just the top 10 performing Kin Developer Program (KDP) participants for their contribution over the month of February. We increased both the amount we allocated and reward all KDP participants for their contributions in the month of March. We continued to establish fraud detection probes between payouts to help to make sure everybody is playing fair.
3. Laying out the foundation for measuring the KRE impact on the growth of the Kin ecosystem. by implementing a currently-internal MVP of a Reward Impact Measurement System capable of visually presenting a few, per-developer, growth perspectives.

Q1 was actually the first quarter all the squad’s key positions were staffed and worked at full capacity, hence we had a bunch to learn both from operational and domain perspectives. Being lean and scrappy proved optimal in this quick-to-change environment we are a part of. Direct conversation with app developers helped us learn much quickly Some fields of major dependency in other Kin squads were identified, and being able to better define the team’s economy-related knowledge gaps became clear.

Q2 Objectives

As you may already be familiar with, the Kin ecosystem goal is building a more fair world, and the mission at hand is being the most used cryptocurrency in the world. While the KRE mission to drive the growth of the Kin Ecosystem through a simple, predictive, and transparent incentive for app developers, based on their contributions to the growth of the ecosystem. It is from that combination that the current Q objectives take shape.

While Q1 2019 was all about launching the KRE, Q2 will focus on scaling the KRE and getting the world know about it. After all, building the KRE is just the first step, getting people to know about an alternative financial model that will improve their apps is essential. As time is of the essence, we decided it would be better to focus the team resources on those two topics.

More specifically, we set our OKR stretch goals as follows:

1. Achieving a capacity of 100 app developers rewarded in a 2 weeks cycle by the end of Q2 — this will enable the growth of the Kin ecosystem and contribute to our developer’s satisfaction.
2. Securing 3 KRE related press articles in major publications: this means making a more exciting KRE and working with marketing in order to let a significant amount of decision makers know about it.

The second objective encompasses a new perspective: making the KRE an exciting game while still providing a sufficient amount of predictability for app developers. Further details will be shared regarding how this would be achieved going forward.

Daily Active Spenders (DAS) is here for Q2

As you may know, the main reward metric is DAS, where each app developer gets rewarded based on the relative daily contribution to spends generated by users. While the team has been and is still inspecting other growth metrics, we decided that for Q2 we’ll keep up with DAS as the main metric in order to focus as many resources as possible to the scaling and marketing objectives discussed above.

That being said, we’re inspecting the possibility of combining other growth metrics on top of DAS in a budget structure that would provide greater predictability, while at the same time allowing for additional incentives that will contribute to the excitement and healthy competition. More details on this will be shared moving forward.